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( Lyons, Colorado )
The Innocence of ScienceThe room has no dimensions other than the space that has just left in a fist made by time as we now know it. Under the covers once things were possible even probable but always before the distinction. She says think back hard to the time when a rock was just a rock. Chaos is not a science it is an appropriated fear of not being able to say something. There was no I in that room, only the board only the incredibly long summer afternoons. The world of that summer was divided into numbers which still look like the arbitrary way others have of assuming a truth is the truth. Held back they said you will be held back like it were a time warp like it were human and therefore responsible and therefore kind somehow not theirs. But science is another way of saying nothing more or less. It is invisible. I hope to survive it into the next millennium.Survivor Tactics… a stranger and afraid, in a world I never made.
A. E. Houseman
With the millennia of traditions that create this space you inhabit, as a bear inhabits a cave, or a fish a stream, but with your heightened sense of awareness, that crutch some call consciousness, these environs on the way to heaven are torturously incomplete. It’s not that you want answers, or the answer, as if there were a gold ring on this wheel you are forced to ride, but you want more than a transfer ticket. You want a sense of validation, reason, a sinecure, but most of all, a space that does not shrink. You want love, perhaps, and/or a few bright children, those fleshy things one leaves behind to tell others which way they have gone. For now that you have found yourself at last alone on the beach at Acapulco, with an umbrella drink in your hand and a sunset that should only be shared, and the warm air curling the hairs on your chest, you don’t feel you deserve such monotony, that somehow you’ve been detoured, misdirected perhaps, and that all you’ve worked for is meant to be enjoyed, isn’t it? You feel like the trajectory of a rocket waiting to fall back down to earth, in the deadly grasp of human gravity, quotidian and diurnal, in fear of the final sum-up and unable even to make the proper face. But think about the doors you have walked by late at night, and the places you could have gone, never to return. Think hard of the one place you could never imagine yourself. Curled in an armchair at home reading an incredible book that you realize only at the last page that you have written, and it ends in a smudged watermark with illegible signature because it has sat in the basement too long gathering mold and disguising the true nature of your choices. And after a short nap, you wake up the survivor, the magician, the god, for you have nothing anymore to go after, and you open the book again, somehow complete.
On the Death of Luís Miguel NavaWhy would a poet be assassinated in this day? What answer could have changed my wonder at seeing his death sentence? But of course, the poet is gay. What death would mean more than a war and an annihilation? What we mean when we say death is war itself. And what word is worth the death of a man or woman? What happens over time when we remember cruelty, blindness, the bigotry of those whose lives are governed by what they alone see as righteous beliefs? Why do his reasons, the poet’s words, come up like a struggling blossom at the exact moment when I learn of his life and that moment is the answer to his death?The Chapel of BonesCapela dos Ossos does not save it the monks’ kind that incredible vision of this world as death personified in the fleshy remains and then this bone haven house of the visible dead all so that we they us and them can remember the origin of sin, fleshy particles of stardust And we come today not to meditate on our frail mortality on the final ends those dark halls where we meet our maker as if He/She/It were an artisan drunk of an afternoon in Portugal in spring but rather to see these bones this wall of fibula and tibia and femur a hall of human skulls like lampposts or the rounded knobs of ornaments but rather to sense these lives somewhere hidden and unburied their bones a chapel no children’s bones were used the guide says, no unhealthy misuse of the dead but rather who here has gone on to look back and want something else or other than the display of what meant nothing anyway those old bones of my body that damn old cracked knee cap what do they mean today that they did not mean yesterday when they were my infrastructure my only secret decoration my hidden heart cage and brain burrow those skulls with eyes like sad questions of why this now floodlights and tourist flashbulbs and the one Euro charge (extra for photos) when it is not death we seek but a sense of these borderline insane monks on a rage to offer themselves up to the life hereafter, or whatever as we would without even thinking there was anything more than the bio-cage to keep this chapel in this other world wondering whether this bone house this bone fort would save one of those old boys from extinctionMotorcycling with KafkaOn the freeway I collect more bugs than Kafka ever saw, but as with him, everyone is aiming at me. I’m the only one on a machine that doesn’t have windows. I would rather have his room with doors. The most dangerous thing now would be a metamorphosis. It’s been hours since the last caffeine, and still a lifetime to go. I wouldn’t be out here of course if you hadn’t called. There’s no Zen in wind this strong, but there are moments of freedom, which get more frequent the more I forget. I never noticed the chrome girls on the mudflaps of eighteen wheelers before. They are the women I confuse you with now. So I nearly miss your exit, my exit, and then can’t find your house.
I - Desperate to Tell
II - Roads Create Probability
III - Like Violets on the Wind
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